Through the figure of the black schoolteacher, Frances E. W.
Harper's Iola Leroy, published in 1892, and Charles Chesnutt's
novel Mandy Oxendine, unpublished during his life-time but believed to
have been written between 1893 and 1896, (1) both reflect on the roles
of black leaders in the age of self-uplift. What makes these texts'
portrayal of teachers significant is that they reveal part of a
conversation about the historical role of black teachers as agents of
the self-uplift movement and about the direction of African American communities. The two books diverge in their views of the potential roles
for black teachers. Harper's text promotes education as a means of
moral and political improvement for black people and teachers as a part
of the forefront of that movement. In contrast, Chesnutt's novel
high-lights the cultural distance that education, class, and color can
create between a teacher and the black community in which he teaches,
challenging the notion of representative black leaders.

Harper's and Chesnutt's portrayals of schoolteacher
figures as nearly white complicates the implications of their texts. By
combining the figure of a black schoolteacher with a mulatto character,
both writers highlight the tension between communal duty and personal
ambition, the very conflict that self-uplift ideology posed to
middle-class African Americans. Because the mixed-race figure has the
option to pass as white and abandon collective interests entirely, he or
she functions as the ultimate symbol of this friction. The choice to
become a schoolteacher, a symbol of black leadership, serves as the
decisive moment in choosing between these paths. Thus, the merging of
teacher and mulatto figure ignites a mediative exploration of self and
communal desire. For Harper the pairing initiates a moral polemic to
demonstrate that the purpose of self-improvement is to contribute to
community advancement. Chesnutt, on the other hand, challenges this
notion of an interdependent community in which individual and shared
interests intersect in a uniformly negotiable terrain. Indeed, Chesnutt
disputes the very idea of a knowable monolithic black community whose
needs can be assessed and gratified by paradigmatic black leaders.

Harper's and Chesnutt's depiction of mulatto figures as
teachers reflects the legacy of education as an integral part of black
resistance and self-help movements in the nineteenth century. In an
essay entitled "A Factor in Human Progress," (2) Harper
characterized the role of education within community service movements:

The education of the intellect and the training of the morals should
go hand-in-hand. The devising brain and the feeling heart should
never be divorced, and the question worth asking is not simply, What
will education do for us? But, what will it help us to do for
others? (Brighter 276)

When Harper published this essay in the African Methodist Episcopal
Church Review in 1885, many African Americans were increasingly looking
to education to solve the problems of African American communities. With
the failure of Reconstruction, the increasingly hostile atmosphere of
exploitative work conditions, disenfranchisement, segregation, and
growing violence led many blacks to look to internal development in the
form of various mutual-aid societies, businessmen's organizations,
fraternal societies, women's clubs, and church-sponsored social
support groups to improve the condition of African American communities.
(3) However, as John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., have put it,
"Negroes could be certain of an improved status only in the field
of education ..." (239).

Harper's and Chesnutt's notion of education as a primary
means of both self and communal advancement reflects this sentiment. In
Iola Leroy, the advantages of a western education allow the
title-character to transform from a white pro-slavery advocate to a
black community leader. The daughter of a Southern slaveholder, Iola
discovers that her mother was her father's slave and that at his
sudden death she too has been sold into slavery. Rescued by Union forces
at the urgings of a former slave, Iola soon identifies herself as
colored and dedicates herself to the uplift of black people. Though she
becomes a nurse for the Union, she vows, "'I intend, when this
conflict is over, to cast my lot with the freedmen as a helper, teacher,
and friend'" (88). It is as a teacher that Iola initiates her
role as a black community activist, speaking at black salons on methods
of improving communities through education. Though Chesnutt's
protagonist, Lowry, has different motives for becoming a teacher, his
own educational experience is indicative of the popular belief that
education would be the key to defeating the ignorance imposed by racial
prejudice. After spending his early years in the "midst of
intellectual stagnation" in a poor and disenfranchised community of
black and mixed-race people, Lowry attends a freedmen's school
where, under the guidance of a Northern teacher, he develops a
"burning desire for a better education, a broader culture and
higher life," leading him on to college (Mandy 28). Though Lowry
accepts his first job as a teacher not for the sake of racial uplift,
but instead because of a pressing need to earn a living, he is a product
of educational initiatives that allow him to reimagine his life
possibilities despite the racial oppression encircling him.

The conviction that education could help one to transcend the
effects of racial exclusion was central to racial uplift's focus on
social and political betterment for African Americans. The historical
ban on education for black slaves in most slave states had left
education forever tied to the definition of freedom for many African
Americans. In fact, this concept of education was an extension of black
educational movements that predated the Civil War. (4) Daniel Alexander
Payne, a graduate of black private education, established a school for
adult slaves and free black children in 1828 (Jones-Wilson 347-48). In
addition, as early as 1833 a black school managed by an African American
woman had existed, unknown to the slave regime, in Savannah, Georgia. By
1860, at least 5 percent of slaves were literate (Anderson 7, 16).
Later, the freedmen's pursuit of education during Reconstruction
was a remarkable illustration of the immutable link between education
and the quest for liberty. At the end of the war, many black people
erected schools and raised money to pay teachers' salaries. In
fact, by 1870, blacks had spent more than $1 million, independent of
outside support, on education, laying the foundation for universal
public education (Foner 43-44). While they appreciated the aid of white
benevolent societies, philanthropists, the Freedmen's Bureau, and
state governments, blacks were already organizing schools before any of
these groups became involved (Anderson 5-7).

The historic intersection between education and the protest for
civil liberty defined education as a vital phase of political agitation
for many African Americans. As James D. Anderson has pointed out, many
black educators believed that "education could help raise the freed
people to an appreciation of their historic responsibility to develop a
better society and that any significant reorganization of the southern
political economy was indissolubly linked to their education"
(Anderson 28). Within this context, black schooling also meant a
redefinition of the role of schoolteachers. If education was to be an
integral part of black political advancement, then schoolteachers would
be the vanguard of this movement. Implicit in this understanding of
education was a belief that black schoolteachers had a responsibility
not only to help blacks help themselves, but also to help them become
part of the cycle of community uplift to help others.

Because of this interpretation of education as a means of community
empowerment, African American teachers were often viewed as community
leaders. In Iola Leroy, the fact that the nearly white title-character
has lived most of her life as white is secondary to her dedication to
serve the black community as a black teacher. This view of teachers as
community leaders is indicative of the political implications of being
both black and a teacher in the nineteenth century. By taking the
initiative to establish schools despite white opposition, risking their
own safety in the name of education, many black schoolteachers
demonstrated their commitment to black progress and defined themselves
as community activists. While many black educators assumed the dual
initiative of teaching moral and liberal education, with the hope of
preparing African Americans for equal participation as citizens and
future black leaders, they also aided freedmen in legal disputes, worked
in mutual-aid societies and black churches, and drafted appeals to the
Freedmen's Bureau, state officials, and Congress. In fact, teaching
often lead to holding political office. At least 70 black teachers
served in state legislatures during the Reconstruction Era (Foner 44).

While Harper and Chesnutt were writing their respective novels,
many black teachers were continuing their work as community activists in
the South after Southern redemption. Between 1880 and 1900, though the
number of Southern black children of school age increased 25 percent,
the proportion attending public schools fell as planters gained control
over the laboring classes and demanded child labor. Nevertheless, black
educators continued to teach (Anderson 23). The Sabbath school
tradition, which Harper portrays in Iola Leroy, was a system of weekend,
night, and Sunday schools established long before the Civil War. These
schools continued to grow after the redemption and lasted well into the
twentieth century as a source of black education that served those who
were unable to attend traditional day schools. By 1885, the A. M. E.
church alone reported having 200,000 children in Sunday schools for
character development as well as liberal instruction (Anderson 13). In
addition, black institutions of higher education set initiatives to
produce more black teachers, and nearly one-third of the black college
graduates during the era became teachers (Bullock 173).

Because black educators were hailed as leaders, to be a black
teacher was more than a profession. It was to be a representative, a
litmus test for the future of the race. Even outside black communities,
black teachers were often viewed as specimens to gauge the potential of
black Americans. Thomas J. Morgan, a white official in the American Home Baptist Mission Society, called African American teachers "models
and examples of what their people can and ought to be" (Anderson
253-54). This statement demonstrates the massive responsibility of
African American teachers not only in terms of their relation to the
black community, but also their position as representatives in the eyes
of whites.

This concept of black teachers made their pedagogies an intense
site of debate about the future of the race, because their curricula
supposedly reflected a model mission for all blacks. The controversy
over liberal vs. industrial education offers an example of how
teacher-training programs for blacks often became sites of contention
over the best plan for the entire race. According to Anderson,
industrial education and liberal education supporters felt that "no
system of beliefs could be transmitted to the millions of black
schoolchildren except through the ideas and behavior of black
teachers" (111). Thus, the debate over these curricula turned many
teacher-training programs into campaigns to infiltrate communities with
a particular ideology through the influence of teachers and demonstrates
the crucial role teachers played in linking to the larger framework of
racial-uplift philosophy.

But while racial-uplift ideology encouraged black advancement and
unity, paradoxically, it also underscored class differences among
African Americans. As Kevin Gaines has pointed out, many elite blacks
imagined black progress as members of the more privileged black classes
serving as purveyors of civilization and uplift to the black masses.
According to Gaines, while black elites hoped that the promotion of
self-help through teachers, missionaries, and soldiers would challenge
racial discrimination, the term self-help came to "signify the mere
existence and stabilizing function of a 'civilized' black
elite that had internalized the instrumental function of social control
assigned to it." The promotion of racial uplift often framed black
class stratification as evidence of progress. Thus, while the insistence
on a "better class of blacks" challenged racial stereotypes,
it also promoted them by characterizing the masses as degenerates whose
salvation depended on the more privileged (Gaines 345-46).

Within this framework, black teachers would serve as an integral
part of the class scale that self-help ideology relied on. Not
surprisingly, the encounter between black teachers and the working
classes was not entirely tension-free. As early as Reconstruction,
though the initial black teaching work force included former slaves,
many African American teachers were descendants of free blacks (Foner
44). In addition, many members of exclusive, affluent, mixed-race
communities (those of visibly mixed-race heritage) also made up a
portion of the teachers (Williamson 130). While this distinction
suggests the unity between the free and freed, it is also indicative of
growing class distinctions among blacks.

Though early self-uplift movements had encouraged the formulation
of a racially unified community that included freedman, affluent free
blacks, and those who had formerly been members of a separate caste,
such as mixed-race communities in port cities, evident class
stratification among these groups increased and condescension toward the
freedman was not unheard of. In fact, a number of free black communities
refused to have their children educated alongside the freedmen (Foner
44-45). While many affluent blacks as well as mixed-race people rushed
to the aid of the freedmen to act as educators and political leaders,
historical analyses of the relationship between many mixed-race leaders
and blacks during the Reconstruction reveal the paternalism of this
arrangement. Joel Williamson has described the alliance thus:
"Faced with an outrightly hostile white population, North and
South, and a grudging, parsimonious government, black people needed the
help that sophisticated, resourceful, and aggressive mulattos could give
them" (88). Thus, implicit in the act of assuming this
responsibility of defining the needs of the black community was
sometimes the presumption of superiority that discredited the ability of
the freedmen to self-govern.

Both Harper and Chesnutt had first-hand knowledge of the
expectations for black teachers as community leaders and the complex
class distinctions that sometimes separated black teachers from their
students. Harper began her career as a teacher at an African Methodist
Episcopal school in Ohio; she was the first female teacher at the Union
Seminary in 1850 (Foster 9). In addition, she delivered numerous
lectures and published essays on the importance of education. She also
helped establish educational programs. Chesnutt taught in rural schools
outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, and by the age of 22 had become
the principal of the Fayetteville Normal School (Andrews 3, 8). In fact,
according to Charles Hackenberry (xvi-xvii), Chesnutt drew on his
journals from his teaching years in the Macedonia school in developing
Mandy Oxendine. Significantly, the experiences the two writers had as
teachers showed them some of the cultural differences that class
interjected into the black schoolroom. Both were well aware of the class
differences between themselves and their students, and both felt
somewhat alienated from their students. Harper was troubled by her
inability to motivate her students in Little York, Pennsylvania. As
Frances Smith Foster has noted, Harper's own education in an
academy for elite blacks may not have equipped her to teach a group that
William Still described in his book on the underground railroad as
"fifty-three untrained little urchins" (qtd. in Foster 9).
Similarly, despite his position within the community as principal of the
school, Chesnutt described himself as living "in a place whose
people do not enter into my train of thoughts and who indeed cannot
understand or sympathize with them" (Journals 157). Hence, both
Chesnutt and Harper contended with a sense of estrangement that
complicated their teaching experiences.

When considering the roles of black teachers in the literature of
the era, this larger historical framework illuminates the social and
political implications of these portrayals. If teachers represented who
black people should be, then to discuss the roles of black teachers was
to debate the future course of the race. If teachers were political
leaders, then the portrayal of black teachers would engage the tenor of
black political economy. And, finally if teaching was a site of class
tensions between middle-class and workingclass blacks, then portrayals
of black teachers would confront the clash of values, commitments,
objectives, and cultures that stratified black communities. By
portraying schoolteachers as mulatto figures who by their very
resemblance to whites represent the potential to abandon black social
causes, Harper and Chesnutt reflect on the supposed duties of the black
middle class in determining the political and social direction of the
larger African American community.

As Carla Peterson has pointed out, Harper's portrayal of her
title-character, Iola Leroy, offers a "narrative of
African-American institutional history, particularly that of church and
school" (Peterson 102). As a teacher, Iola's experience
reflects that of many African American teachers during the
Reconstruction. She establishes a school in the basement of a black
church, and young and old travel from distant communities to learn.
Indeed, she soon finds that she must turn some away due to overcrowding.
In keeping with the pedagogy of many African American educators, Iola
vows not only to offer her students liberal education, but also
character training to make them good citizens. The narrator intimates
how this kind of training could shape the values of black communities by
infiltrating the home: "The school was beginning to lift up the
home, for Iola was not satisfied to teach her children only the
rudiments of knowledge. She had tried to lay the foundation of good
character" (Iola 111). Significantly, though the text never refers
to Iola as a teacher of industrial skills, she does not object to
industrial education and agrees with a folk character who promotes a
combination of liberal and practical education. In addition, Iola must
contend with racially inspired violence against her school when white
vigilantes burn it down.

Harper uses Iola's role as a school-teacher to initiate her
rank within the community as a black leader, demonstrating intimate ties
between school teaching and community activism. At a salon in which
various leaders address black community issues, Iola is invited to
speak, and she takes as her topic the theme of "The Education of
Mothers." Throughout the novel, Iola insists on the importance of
women's education. She not only counsels mothers, but she offers
guidance for young girls, and delivers speeches to men and women about
the future of the race. Iola later retires from her career as a public
schoolteacher; marries another educated, nearly white mulatto who shares
her dedication to racial uplift; and resumes her teaching career as a
Sunday schoolteacher, emphasizing the important role of the Sabbath
school tradition in an age of increasing child labor.

Harper's positioning of Iola as a schoolteacher and therefore
race reformer offers a problematic situation in that Iola's only
prior relation to blacks was as their mistress. When she considers the
prospect of a teaching career while working as a nurse for the Union
during the Civil War, she boasts that she was a favorite of the slave
children on her father's plantation, demonstrating the only scheme
in which she can configure her relation to black people. The dialect of
many of the black folk characters is always quaint to Iola, but it is
familiar to her only through memories of her plantation mammy. Indeed
her limited interaction with the folk seems to make her ill-fitted to
assume the role of community leader. But as Hazel Carby has noted (78),
in the context of Harper's novel, Iola's Western education,
her literacy and middle-class values, allows her to be a schoolteacher.
Thus, her education and the class identification that it signifies
become her passport to her role as a community leader. The promotion of
Western cultural superiority in the text is difficult to refute,
although other critics have pointed to Lucy, the darkskinned educator in
the novel, by way of challenging this interpretation. (5)

Indeed, Harper's use of a middle-class, mixed-race character
in the role of community leader has incited much controversy. Critics
have been unforgiving of the seeming incongruity between the text's
attention to the problems of the black masses and its reliance on a
nearly white character as an example of black self-uplift. Barbara
Christian has argued that Iola Leroy describes "a black middle
class headed by mulattos who feel a grave responsibility of defining for
the black race what is best for it" (206). Vashti Lewis adds that
Harper is "guilty albeit unwittingly of the perpetuation of an
image of black women in this country that suggests that those who have
dark skin and whose hair is not straight are not only ugly but also
never experience tragedy in their lives" (Lewis 322). Others,
including Deborah McDowell (39), have attributed Harper's use of
nearly white characters to her pandering to a white audience.

But by portraying a mulatto figure as a teacher, Harper dramatizes
the conflict between personal advancement and self-sacrifice through the
mulatto figure's choice to be white or black, to abandon black
social causes or to use her advantages to benefit the black community.
The wide disparity between Iola's racial and class status and that
of the black masses illustrates the growing class tensions within black
communities of the era. By framing her mulatto character as a teacher,
someone who supposedly reflected a model for unified African American
progress, and as one who had also occupied the extremes of social
strata, Harper attempts to diminish this friction. Having been black and
white, slave and free, rich and poor, Iola's life journey
integrates the experiences of the exceedingly privileged as well as the
severely degraded to demonstrate the necessity of a unified effort
toward black advancement. Harper harnesses the significance of black
schoolteachers as models for African American advancement while also
depicting the re-identification of Iola's class position to pose
her activism as an inclusive example to all African Americans. (6)

By portraying a mulatto figure as a teacher, Chesnutt also evokes
the issue of community service versus personal interest. However,
Chesnutt revises this twofold elective framework by exploring how a
complex web of difference shapes the protagonist's choices. The
very differences that make Iola capable of becoming a dedicated
community leader make Lowry ill-suited as a representative for rural
blacks. By illustrating how class, color, and educational boundaries
merge to form a cultural breach that separates the teacher and the town,
Chesnutt challenges the responsibility and indeed the adequacy of black
middle-class teachers as community activists for the working-class black
majority. Chesnutt offers a teacher who is neither a devoted community
activist nor a white-identified person alienated from the black
community. Lowry is an accepted member of a black community and is
dispassionate about that community's interests. His self-absorbed
posture is best captured in the novel's central narrative, in which
he obtains a teaching job at the Sandy Run Colored School not for the
sake of racial uplift but, rather, in pursuit of his childhood
sweetheart, the nearly white title-character Mandy Oxendine. Upon
discovering that she has relocated to this rural town in North Carolina,
Lowry plans to follow her and arranges to take a position as a teacher
to support himself while there. When he arrives, he discovers to his
dismay that Mandy is living as white and, thus, his being known as the
colored teacher makes it difficult for him to have any contact with her.
In addition, Mandy is being pursued by a white aristocrat, Utley, whom
she is determined to marry, though she wants to keep Lowry as a second
choice. When Utley is killed in an attempt to rape Mandy, the novel
becomes a murder mystery. Mandy is arrested, and to save her Lowry
confesses to the crime. Within hours the teacher has a lynch rope around
his neck. Finally, in a rapid succession of events, they are both
rescued, and they run away together, though the narrator tells us it is
unknown whether they lived as black or white.

Chesnutt's thorough delineation of Lowry's complex views
on class and race reveals the complicated intersections between the two,
challenging the binary framework embedded in the choice to be black or
white in Harper's text. Lowry's feelings about racial identity
are mediated by his craving for class status. He has grown up among
blacks and other mixed-race people, and though he feels no intense
commitment to the uplift of blacks, he has had no real inclination
permanently to pass as white either, though he passes occasionally. But
Lowry's reason for declining to pass conflicts with Iola's
self-sacrificial convictions. He chooses not to pass permanently, not
because he thinks it is morally wrong, but because it suggests that he
is ashamed of a slave ancestry, and he proudly maintains that he has
none. As the narrator puts it,

He [Lowry] was not responsible for his
drop of dark blood. He had come by it
honestly, for his father and mother,
who were both of his own class, had
been lawfully wedded. He had never
been a slave, nor so far as tradition
told of his ancestry had he ever had a
slave ancestor. (46)

Lowry's association of shame with the slave past is a striking
departure from Iola's mission to reclaim that past and repair the
family ties that it severed. His pride in his remoteness from slavery
points to his acute resentment of the conflation of race and class. But
unlike Iola, who attempts to extend her middle-class values to the
masses to correct this conflation, Lowry's desire to achieve
personal class mobility unrestricted by racial identity shapes the core
of his character, particularly his intense ambition. He dreams of fame,
though the narrator never divulges in what capacity he hopes to achieve
recognition. But Lowry also discerns that whiteness alone does not
ensure class status. As an aspiring young man, he concludes that, if he
did accomplish anything great, people would discover his origins, and if
not then it was "merely a choice of mud-puddles, whether he should
be a white tadpole or a black one" (46). Thus, Lowry's choice
not to pass is also influenced by his recognition that to be poor and
white is little better than to be black. This awareness of the
complicated class boundaries that intersect with racial ones displaces
the relinquishing of whiteness as the ultimate sacrifice.

Whereas Iola's education allows her to assume the role of
schoolteacher and thus community leader, Lowry's education sparks
his preference for personal advancement over community progress. As he
pursues higher education, Lowry reads of great nations that expired,
civilizations that decayed, philosophies and religious systems that
faded, and he concludes that there was "little an individual could
accomplish compared with the achievements of the [human] race"
(29). Ironically, Lowry's education is the product of
freedmen's school initiatives and white Northern philanthropy in
support of black colleges, but rather than making Lowry a community
leader, education inspires in him class aspirations that revolve around a desire for wealth and opportunity. This narrative revision foregrounds
the economics of Iola's and Lowry's social positions. As a
person who has lived most of her life as a wealthy white woman, Iola has
privileges to renounce, thus allowing her to perform acts of
self-sacrifice. In contrast, segregation and meager resources have
shaped Lowry's life, and he uses this one kernel of philanthropic
benevolence to gain a foothold on financial independence and social
mobility. For Lowry, immediate practical issues, such as how he will
gain subsistence, are crucial. Lowry's interpretation of his
liberal education in support of personal motives illustrates the
privilege embedded in the synoptical perspective that Iola adopts.

Through Lowry's relationship with Mandy, Chesnutt elucidates
the teacher's preoccupation with personal achievement and his
growing indifference toward the black community. In contrast to
Harper's neat pairing of two mulatto figures drawn to each other
through their commitment to racial advancement, Chesnutt offers a pair
united by the pursuit of social mobility. Like Lowry, Mandy seeks social
advancement but believes her best opportunity is marriage to an
aristocrat. Such a marriage would require her to pass as white, but
passing poses no moral dilemma for Mandy, who despises visibly black
people, whom she refers to as "'black, ugly and
pore'" (23). Though Lowry gently scolds Mandy for such
statements, he is so engrossed in his pursuit of her that her opinions
matter little to him, and he even consents to pass as white when Mandy
makes it clear that he must in order to be with her. As the scale
shifts, the once-well-intentioned teacher becomes self-absorbed and
neglectful of his primary duties as an instructor. The children become
like shadows to him as he daydreams of Mandy. He dismisses school early
to intercept her, and he even plots to escape lingering students after
school to enable his secret interludes with her.

Despite the teacher's apathy toward black community interests
and his avid self-involvement, Chesnutt frames him within circumstances
that figure him as an involuntary racial leader, parodying the
coalescence of the teacher and racial activist roles. The whites
immediately resent Lowry because they are bitter about the expense that
black public education is costing their community, which is still
recovering from the economic losses of the war. In addition, by offering
the children an education, Lowry is disrupting the child labor force and
probably lessening the probability that the children will become adult
wage laborers. While the implications of Lowry's resistance to the
white community's opposition figure him as a community leader,
Lowry never consciously imagines himself as having any community
responsibility.

Nonetheless, the black community's response to Lowry
demonstrates their high regard for him as a distinguished addition to
their community and potential leader. Though they sense a difference in
color and culture between him and themselves and are "shy ... of
this white young man who looked and bore himself so little like one of
themselves," he is immediately asked to take a Sunday school class,
demonstrating the community's confidence in Lowry's commitment
to them beyond his employment in the classroom (10). They welcome him
with much ceremony, and overwhelm him with their attempts to socialize with him. Even the town's most distinguished black citizen, Mr.
Revels, offers one of his daughters and a dowry of land to him.

By portraying Lowry as maintaining a state of detached amusement in
his contact with the rural blacks, notwithstanding their esteem for him,
Chesnutt delineates the ideological gulf that divides the teacher from
the folk community. Reflecting Lowry's consciousness, the narrator
at times mocks everything from the folk's polite conversation to
their cultural values, and ultimately the folk characters' everyday
conduct becomes a distancing performance to Lowry. For example, when he
arrives, his host Deacon Pate quickly delivers a speech on the purposes
of education:

Though Lowry finds Pate "witty," and sometimes even
"shrewd," he also thinks he's "by no means profound
enough to be worthy of record" (10).

Pate's speech suggests a surreptitious jibe at Chesnutt's
longtime friend Booker T. Washington. (7) Despite their friendship,
Chesnutt was somewhat ambivalent about Washington's support of
industrial education for blacks. Moreover, in the context of
Chesnutt's depiction of Lowry as a reluctant racial leader, this
reference to Washington implies a resentment of the construction of
supposedly representative racial leaders, a process that was heavily
influenced by whites. (8) As the scene unfolds, Pate's attempt to
initiate a dialogue deteriorates into unilateral expression and
indifferent silence, demonstrating the fallacy of monolithic black
thought. Through Lowry's assumed role of dispassionate observer,
Chesnutt illustrates that there is no potential for an exchange of ideas
between the men, confirming the depth of the cultural chasm between
them.

Chesnutt's representation of the folk is distinct from
Harper's. Though Harper represents the folk as in need of the
services of a schoolteacher capable of instructing the masses about the
duties and rights of citizenship and moral character, she also
demonstrates their capacity for learning if given the chance. As Mary
Elkins has noted (46), Harper's opening scene, which reveals the
secret code used by the black community to communicate news of the war,
discloses Harper's more complicated portrayal of the folk. By
discussing the condition of eggs and fish, they convey whether the North
or the South is winning the war. Chesnutt's representation of
Pate's material understanding of the world deviates from
Harper's depiction of the folk as using domestic items to
disseminate information. Harper portrays the folk as capable not merely
of shrewdness, but also of an abstract understanding of the world, as
they adapt the elements of their domestic service to conceal their
interest in political affairs. Their ability to connect the domestic
items to abstract ideas suggests that they are capable of more than
concern for immediate material advantages, but also moral and political
ideas. Thus, Harper represents the folk as able to understand the moral
and academic education that Iola will offer them. But Pate's
inability to understand the world beyond its practical value
distinguishes him as forever exiled from the intellectual space that
Lowry occupies. Though Lowry hopes to receive practical rewards for his
talents, he also eagerly experiences the "intoxication of
learning," and thus Pate's empirical evaluation of education
demonstrates the obstacles between two men (29).

Chesnutt compounds this sense of alienation between Lowry and the
folk through the portrayal of Lowry's teaching experiences. His
encounter with the children encapsulates the complicated social
divisions that limit his potential to be a racial leader. Rather than
offering speeches on moral development, Lowry responds to the
children's morally questionable views with amusement and feigned agreement. His acquaintance with a particular student, Rose Amelia
Sunday, captures the sense of detachment and condescension that defines
his relationship with his pupils. A passionate child, Rose Amelia is
romantically fixated on Lowry, who is unaware of her obsession and has
no idea that Rose Amelia follows him religiously. Indeed, Lowry's
routine inability to recognize Rose Amelia's presence beyond the
classroom becomes the definitive statement of his impotence as a
communal leader. When he does occasionally notice her, Lowry casts her
as an entertaining environmental detail. He is amused by her appearance,
which strikes him as a "contrast between the old wizened look of
her ugly little face ... and the meager childish figure surrounded by
it." This contrast leaves Lowry unable to determine her age,
demonstrating his abbreviated understanding of her. This tendency to
reduce Rose Amelia to shorthand is evident when she recites her name,
"Mississippi Nova Scotia Rose Amelia Sunday," and he
immediately shortens it in the school ledger without considering her
preference (15). This pattern of dismissal culminates as Rose Amelia
takes her life, believing that, by accusing Mandy of killing Utley, she
has endangered Lowry. Though he is saddened, Lowry remains unaware of
his role in her death. (9)

Although Lowry's incidental resistance to the traditional role
of African American teachers seems to validate the configuration of
class difference, it also challenges the paternal implications of such
arrangements. Despite Lowry's indifference, he neither pities the
folk nor assumes the responsibility of uplifting them. He accepts the
distance between himself and the folk without interpreting it as their
inability to take responsibility for themselves. In this sense, Chesnutt
presents an alternative to the prevailing self-help doctrine that the
future for black people would rely on middle-class blacks lending help
to the working classes. (10)

The class differences that Chesnutt imagines as gaping cultural
rifts between the teacher and the town, Harper envisions as ripe
opportunities for improving the masses. Though it would be reductive to
read Harper's and Chesnutt's literary contributions as mere
extensions of their educational values, their works reflect their
discordant experiences and offer insight into how they construct and
justify the social choices that their protagonists make. Lowry's
sense of difference between himself and a community only miles from
where he grew up is better understood in light of the difference between
Chesnutt's education and that of the nearby rural blacks that he
would later teach. Similarly, Iola's sense of duty, expressed in
her choice to become a teacher and leader among a community that she
knows little about, is illuminated by Harper's immersion in the
common political interests of slaves and free blacks during the
antebellum era. Harper's essays and Chesnutt's journals offer
reflections of how each writer's experiences as both teachers and
students informed their representation of the self-help movement and the
role of the school teacher within it.

Harper's theory of teachers' roles in self-help movements
is best captured in her 1885 essay "A Factor in Human
Progress," in which she describes a black schoolteacher in the
South who complains of a "lack of society" among a gossiping
black community. Harper explains that, instead of complaining about her
neighbors and shunning them, the schoolteacher should be educating them
in conversation, parenting, and temperance. Harper offers this monologue
describing what such a woman should resolve to do when faced with such
neighbors:

These women can not improve me, but
I will try to improve them. If they talk
nothing but gossip, I will try to raise
the tone of conversation.... I will
study to teach these mothers how to
take care of their little ones; I will learn
something of the sophistries of strong
drink, ... and teach them how intemperance
adds to the burdens, waste
and miseries of society, because I have
had advantages that were denied
them; as a friend and sister, I will gladly
share with them my richer heritage
... for the best test of an education is
not simply what we know, but what
we do, and what we are. (Brighter 14-18)

Thus, Harper suggests that, rather than lamenting cultural
differences, the teacher, through instruction, might narrow those
differences. This educational model reflects the intimate ties between
education and action and the notion of educational leadership as a
propelling force for the cycle of uplift. Though Harper clearly outlines
the leadership role that this teacher should assume beyond the
classroom, her suggestion that the woman should study and learn about a
community's needs demonstrates that Harper does not assume that the
woman's education equips her with an understanding of the needs of
all communities. Instead, education is a tool that allows her to seek
out resources to learn about a particular community and apply the
knowledge she gleans. Though Harper's relegation of intemperance and parental negligence to this community based on an account of their
gossiping is reductive, she also recognizes the hypocrisy of this
schoolteacher gossiping about the community's tendency to gossip.
Thus, her criticism of the schoolteacher is also a critique of education
for the purpose of pedantry.

In contrast, though Chesnutt's journals demonstrate a focus on
the importance of education in combating ignorance, they also reveal an
almost hostile attitude toward the uneducated black masses:

Well! Uneducated people are the most
bigoted, superstitious, hardest headed
people in the world! Those folks down
stairs believe in ghost, luck, horse
shoes ... and all other kinds of nonsense,
and all the argument in the
world couldn't get it out of them. It is
useless to argue with such persons. All
the eloquence of a Demostenes, the
logic of Plato, the demonstrations of
the most learned men in this world
couldn't convince them of the falsity,
the absurdity, the utter impossibility
and unreasonableness of such things.
Verily education is a great thing, and I
would I could quote a quire or two of
Mayhew's Universal Education on the
subject, "Education lessens and dissipates
the effects of ignorance."
(Journals 81-82) (11)

While he professes the importance of education, the sense of
impenetrable class differences emerges as Chesnutt points out that
certain people are uneducable. Though it may seem odd that Chesnutt, a
product of Southern free schools, would have such impressions of rural
blacks, his own educational opportunities bore little resemblance to
theirs. As Richard Brodhead has noted, Chesnutt's access to the
Howard School of Fayetteville, North Carolina, a well-funded school
initiated by blacks and the Freedman's Bureau and funded by
Northern philanthropic support, offered him educational advantages that
unsupported rural schools lacked the resources to provide. According to
Brodhead, the educational advances to which Chesnutt and others who
attended well-funded schools were exposed led to a growing, diversified
class structure, with an emerging black intelligentsia at its helm. He
points out that "doctors, lawyers, preachers, and especially
educators--were taught in the new schools that arose with the end of
slavery, and so were enabled by an education like Chesnutt's."
However, Brodhead also notes that, though this education permitted many
to become leaders in the effort to lift the black masses, it also
produced a changing sense of social identity, leading people to
"experience themselves as different from the masses" (16).
This feeling of difference evident in Chestnut's journals
elucidates the firm impression of cultural difference that Lowry
experiences in his social transactions with the folk characters.

Hence, some of the differences in how each author approaches the
role of schoolteachers, and issues of class within self-help movements,
stem from chronological differences of the pre-Civil War era, in which
Harper grew up, and the Reconstruction era in which Chesnutt came of
age. While Chesnutt was receiving the educational advantages that
Reconstruction allowed, Harper was already educating as she traveled the
South as a full-time lecturer. Though Harper, like Chesnutt, had the
advantage of a better education than did many of her peers, she also
experienced the precarious situation of so-called free blacks in the
North during the antebellum years. (12) When she came to adulthood in
the midst of the controversy over the Compromise of 1850, Harper was
living in Maryland, as a free black in a slave state at a time when the
lines between slave and free could shift at any moment due to the
Fugitive Slave Act. Not long after, Harper's family was forced by
local officials to disband their elite school for blacks and sell their
home. Unable to return to Maryland after 1853 due to a law forbidding
free blacks from entering the state, Harper soon committed herself to
the anti-slavery cause when a free black man was arrested and enslaved for entering Maryland (Foster 10).

Undoubtedly Harper's precarious existence as a free black
person in the antebellum era helped to shape her sense of duty to the
communal cause of African American freedom. The dubious distinctions
between slave and free meant that, though there may have been class
differences between the groups, their political interests were
intimately connected, since black and slave were becoming increasingly
interchangeable. Thus, though Harper may have had educational
advantages, the vulnerability of her own freedom was inextricably linked
to slavery, and her emphasis on the importance of the community reflects
the sense of collective duty and sacrifice that the antislavery cause
necessitated. By beginning Iola's trajectory within slavery Harper
evokes this unifying African American experience to elicit a call for
African American collective activism. Harper poses Iola's life as a
microcosm of the collective history of African Americans, as she passes
through slavery, Reconstruction, and often implicitly the redemption.
Within this context, Harper's depiction of Iola's choice to
become an African American schoolteacher poses Iola's sacrifice and
community activism as an opportunity for all African Americans. Harper
offers a narrative of African American progress, rendering the teacher
figure as activist as the ultimate goal.

Harper's and Chesnutt's approaches to education also
reflect the varying opportunities available to men and women at the turn
of the century. Certainly by embracing self-help ideology, Harper could
create a space for a black woman to assume a position of leadership. The
role of teacher functions as a mediation between gender spheres,
straddling the threshold of domestic and public roles. The political
leadership embedded in the perception of the duties of black
schoolteachers illuminates the wider political implications of black
women assuming this role. If schoolteachers could be considered
representatives of the race, this would allow black women to represent
themselves within the larger political context. While Harper's male
characters contribute and become community leaders through various
occupations, including doctors, soldiers, preachers, and teachers,
teaching becomes the primary outlet for women like Iola, Lucy, and
earlier Harper heroines, such as Minnie of Minnie's Sacrifice and
Annette of Trial and Triumph. Iola's brother Harry becomes the head
of the school along with his wife Lucille, but Harry has also been an
officer in a black Civil War regiment, demonstrating the multiple
choices at his disposal. Harper emphasizes that Iola chooses teaching
because of the social work that it involves, but she also demonstrates
that the limited occupations open to Iola would otherwise preclude her
from becoming a race leader and benefitting the black community.

While working at a store under a kind employer Iola states: "
'I am preparing to teach, and must spend my leisure time in
study.... to be an expert accountant is not the best use to which I can
put my life'" (203). Thus, teaching becomes the primary outlet
for women to contribute to the self-help movement, and a way of
positioning a public role for women not merely as a possible role, but
as a duty of educated black women. Hence, Harper's emphasis on
communal duty also reflects a desire for black women's political
advancement.

These historical differences that emerge with the pairing of
Chesnutt's rediscovered novel and Harper's wellknown Iola
Leroy expand our understanding of Harper's representation of the
black middle class and its role in relation to the working classes, as
we envision Chesnutt's generation, one that grew up in the midst of
increasing class differences, as a potential audience. Indeed, the
pairing solves the riddle of Harper's return to a plot that she had
already commenced in her earlier novel, Minnie's Sacrifice (1869),
a plot that is also driven by slavery. (13) While Harper acknowledges
the class differences of the post-war era, she uses the schoolteacher as
a symbol of the black middle class to demonstrate how these differences
might be points of connection rather than impediments between groups,
calling attention to the unified resistance against slavery as a
struggle that must extend to racial intolerance in the post-war era. In
contrast, Chesnutt's representation of the schoolteacher posits
class as more than a material difference that can be extended to others,
but as a powerful idea that initiates a reconceptualization of self and
community. Though the lines of race function as liquid boundaries that
shift at will in both novels, the lines of class pose a more difficult
terrain. The barriers between teachers and their communities can be
surpassed only through carefully built bridges of educational uplift, as
in Iola Leroy, or they may function as one-way channels, across which
schoolteachers

Notes

(1.) Using Chesnutt's letters, Charles Hackenberry estimates
that Mandy Oxendine may have been started in 1894 and been completed in
1896, though it possibly could have existed, in one form or another, as
early as 1889 (xiv-xvii). According to William L. Andrews, however, the
story was probably written in 1893 and revised in 1894 or 1895 before
submission to the Atlantic Monthly, where it was rejected (145).

(2.) Harper's "A Factor in Human Progress" was
originally published in African Methodist Episcopal Church Review 2
(1885): 14-18.

(3.) For a discussion of black self-help organizations after
Reconstruction, see Meier 121-38.

(4.) For a thorough analysis of the relationship between freedom
and education for African Americans before and after the Civil War, see
Anderson.

(5.) Marilyn Elkins argues that there is no hierarchy of class or
color among the women characters in Harper's work. In addition,
John Ernest contends that Harper suggests education is a mutual effort,
not just the socialization of one culture as defined by another.

(6.) By using a mulatto figure as her central character, Harper
also confronted implications of other mulatto fiction, particularly that
of William Dean Howells. Appearing a year before the publication of Iola
Leroy, his An Imperative Duty (1891) revolves around a nearly white
mulatto figure who discovers her African heritage, decides to become a
black schoolteacher, and then reconsiders and chooses to live as white.
Similar plots had emerged in mulatto fiction, such as Lydia Maria
Child's A Romance of the Republic (1867), in which two nearly white
heroines discover they are the descendants of slaves and continue to
live as white, marry white men, and hide their antecedents from their
children. Harper had spoken against what she felt were the degrading
moral implications of this plot as early as 1869 in her endnote to
Minnie's Sacrifice: "While some of the authors of the present
day have been weaving their stories about white men marrying beautiful
quadroon girls, who in so doing were lost to us socially, I conceived of
one of that same class to whom I gave a higher holier destiny .... it is
braver to suffer with one's own branch of the human race ... than
to attempt to creep out of all identity ... for the sake of mere
personal advantages" (91). Harper's criticism reflects the
complicated social implications of these plots. While on the surface
these heroines' choices to live as white suggest the insignificance of racial distinctions, this portrayal also implies that the race
problem could be solved if blacks were absorbed into the white race,
making one visibly white nation. Harper's revision of this plot in
Minnie's Sacrifice and Iola Leroy illustrates her attempt to
situate racism, not race, as the definitive problem to be solved. For
comparisons of Iola Leroy and An Imperative Duty, see Birnbaum; Warren
66-70. For discussions of Howells's patronage of Chesnutt, see
Nettels. For discussions of An Imperative Duty, see Wonham; Clymer.

(7.) According to Arlene Elder, despite his lifelong friendship
with Booker T. Washington, Chesnutt agreed more with W. E. B. Du
Bois's theories, which supported liberal education. While Chesnutt
did not object to industrial education, he contended that there was no
single plan that would solve the problems of all blacks, and that
African Americans should also have the opportunity for liberal education
and political advancement.

(8.) Though Washington was clearly in the minority among black
educators in his support of industrial education for blacks, the
consistency of manual education and the much needed wage labor in the
South had contributed to Washington's preeminence as more than an
educator--in fact, as the designated black leader. As James Anderson has
noted, by 1881 many white Southerners began to recognize that, while the
gains of black education could not be rescinded, perhaps black
educational methods could be adapted to meet the need for manual labor
in the South (31).

(9.) In his representation of Rose Amelia, Chesnutt shifts the role
traditionally associated with the mixed-race character by making the
black character one who is trapped in a body that doesn't fit her
inner identity and who dies tragically as a result. Chesnutt portrays
Rose Amelia as inhabiting a body that does not allow her to realize her
aristocratic principles and bars her from fulfilling her hopeless love
for Lowry: "Rose Amelia's soul was that of an aristocrat,
which by some wanton freak of fate had been locked up in a chrysalis from which it could never emerge" (80). When she realizes that her
attempt to have Mandy imprisoned to save Lowry from being accused of
Utley's murder has forced Lowry to confess to the crime to save
Mandy, Rose Amelia is emotionally shattered. She is found dead the
following day, and the narrator ambiguously implies that she committed
suicide to atone for her act which, she believed, would lead to
Lowry's death. This narratological dislocation underscores color as
a determinant of Lowry's role as a detached witness within the
Sandy Run community. By substituting the black body as the site of
conflicted identity that initiates an ill-fated trajectory, Chesnutt
foregrounds the social mobility that Lowry's and Mandy's
bodies facilitate. Though Harper's Iola Leroy could also be read as
a revision of a tragic mulatto plot, Iola still has to confront the
conflict between her white body and her theoretical blackness, and upon
discovering her heritage she wishes herself dead. As Werner Sollors has
pointed out (238), though this narrative structure is commonly
associated with the notion of the "tragic mulatto," a
diversity of plots developed around mixed-race characters. I am
suggesting, however, that Chesnutt's evocation of a trajectory that
leads to the mixed-race character's death responds to the variety
of texts published throughout the century that included such narratives
as Lydia Maria Child's "The Quadroons" (1842) and George
Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1879-80). Indeed,
Chesnutt's later novel House Behind the Cedars (1900) depends upon
this plot structure as well. For other discussions of the "tragic
mulatto," and revisions of the trope, see Sollors; DuCille; Bost;
Elfenbein; Zanger; Spillers; Yellin.

(10.) Just as class divides Lowry from this black community, racial
identity makes him victim to the white community as Chesnutt reveals the
complex network of borders within borders that Lowry straddles. In
Chesnutt's novel the critical juncture is not the internal choice
to become a teacher, or to be black or white, but rather the externally
imposed exposure to the lynching block where the choice to live or die
is not Lowry's own. Despite his disinterest in black communal
causes, Lowry's discordant identity as both middle-class and black
is briefly submerged as he is reduced to a symbol of racial injustice
and violence. His rapid trajectory from schoolroom to lynching block
suggests that the burden of race is not restricted to those who resolve
to sacrifice their lives for racial advancement. In light of
Harper's text and the general call for racial advancement through
teachers and other racial leaders, this portrayal also suggests that
personal experience with racism was trial enough, without assuming
responsibility for the entire race.

(11.) As Richard Brodhead has noted, Chesnutt's journals
exhibit ambivalence about the culture of rural Southern uneducated
blacks. While Chesnutt is sometimes condescending, he later describes
his interest in black popular culture. However, as Brodhead notes,
Chesnutt often determined the value of black art forms by their
relevance to Western standards. For more, see Brodhead's
"Introduction" to The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt (23-24).

(12.) Harper attended the academy of her uncle, William Watkins,
which focused on high academic standards, political leadership, and
Christian service. Though her early education afforded her many
opportunities, Harper's school days ended early, and at the age of
thirteen she began work as a domestic (Foster, "Introduction"
6-8).

(13.) As Frances Smith Foster has noted in her
"Introduction" to Minnie's Sacrifice, numerous
similarities in plot structure, characterization, and themes emerge
between the two novels (xxix).

Anderson, James. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935.
Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988.

Andrews, William L. The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980.

Cassandra Jackson received her Ph.D. from Emory University and is
currently an assistant professor at Northeastern University, where she
is writing a book about mulatto figures in nineteenth-century American
fiction. Professor Jackson would like to thank Frances Smith Foster for
her generous assistance with this article, William L. Andrews for
directing her to Chesnutt's Mandy Oxendine, and the New England Board of Higher Education and Northeastern University for sponsoring her
research.

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